Utopias of the Third Kind Page 3
Interestingly, while declaring literary utopias to be a lost cause, Krishan Kumar mentions one kind of real-world utopia that has not, according to him, as yet found its theoreticians or chroniclers. He uses the term “glocalization,” attributed to Roland Robertson, to describe a kind of present-day utopianism that is distinct from the experiments of the past, in which small, locally grounded practices of better ways of living are also consciously global in seeking and accepting influence, resources and insights. He does not elaborate, nor does he mention the Vikalp Sangam Project or the Global tapestry of Alternatives, but several of the stories I heard from scholars and activists at the SSFS7 conference would fit his description of a glocalized utopia.
Utopias of the Third Kind
As someone born, raised and formed in a country that was colonized by the British for two hundred years, I am especially interested in utopian imagination as a response to colonialism. As Lyman Tower Sargent points out, there are two kinds of colonialism, broadly speaking—settler colonialism (North American and Australian) and the kind in which resource exploitation is the key motivation (such as India under British rule), although you can also have something in between. Each gives rise to its own visions of a “better future.” Of the responses to colonialism, I enumerate three. One is a reactionary, exclusionary, nationalistic response that looks backward to a conveniently edited golden past, and seeks to recreate it in the present, usually by excluding not only the colonizers but any group considered inconvenient for the project. It is based on manufactured pride and a masculinist hubris concealing a deep insecurity, a sense of not being good enough. This is the kind of utopia that—especially if it is conceived by a socially privileged group in a diverse society—depends on the coexistence of dystopias for multiple others. However much it might seek to idealize existence for its preferred citizens within its borders, it has boundary lines of hate and exclusion. A second response to colonialism is a vision that seeks to emulate the values, technologies, and social systems of the colonizers, to best them on their terms, eschewing precolonial knowledges, histories, and epistemologies in favor of modernity. This is an aspect of sociologist Anibal Quijano’s notion of coloniality of power, referring to the way that colonial power structures cement racial hierarchies and enable epistemic and cultural dominance, even when the colonizers are far away. Here also a key affective component is shame—a feeling of not being worthy, or being backward. These are, of course, at extreme ends of a continuum—a hybrid of the two is quite possible. What unites the two kinds of utopian visions—exclusionary/reactionary and mimetic/modernist is this: they are both responses to colonization in which the colonizer remains the unit of comparison.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit …
So the poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore sang of a very different conception of India. Tagore opposed British rule and was critical of nationalism as a modernist construct but also critiqued Indian social norms and hierarchies. Could there be, then, a third response to colonialism, one that frees us from the standards and measures of the colonizing power?
Rabindranath composed his hopeful paean to the India of the future before the British left. But we don’t simply live in countries—countries are socially constructed abstractions, as any view of Earth from space will tell us. We live in places. Writing the first draft of this essay near Delhi, there I was, with the mango tree outside the window, the warbler singing in the bushes, the vegetable seller pushing his cart on the road outside, calling. We are local beings, yet we are inevitably connected to the rest of the planet, indebted to planet-spanning, life-maintaining processes and cycles. The molecules in the breath I’ve just taken now, were, a year or two ago, expelled from the blowhole of a bowhead whale in the Arctic, mingled with those in a hot Saharan wind, and the exhalation of the Amazon rainforest. In premodern times, we could be content with being local, living in small settlements or as hunter-gatherers deeply connected to our environs. In this moment of multiple planetary crises, we must come to the realization that we are simultaneously local and planetary.
Utopias of the third kind—as I conceive them—are visions that are grounded in the local, in its geography and social-cultural-ecological surround, but locate themselves in a planetary context, where “local” and “planetary” are not mutually exclusive categories but are connected in space and time. More often than not, such utopias result from struggle, resistance, and the kind of imaginative creativity that is best forged by those exploited and exiled by the systems of power. This third response to colonialism—whether settler colonialism or resource-extractive colonialism at a distance—questions not only the paradigms of the colonizers but also those of one’s own culture and history, and values aspects of both. Nor does such a response limit itself solely to the axis of colonizer-colonized, but learns from other cultures and peoples of the various ways of being. Such a response is not static or rigid, but always learning, always in a process of adjustment and change. This curious, critical, playful, open examination of possibilities within and beyond the experience of colonization seems to me to be the most freeing.
Of course, this “definition” of Utopias of the Third Kind is very general, so I will focus on a subset of this category in which I am most interested, one which is distinguished by a radical egalitarianism. Even when there is some degree of homogeneity due to historical reasons, for example in tribal communities, the boundary lines of such utopias as I imagine them are not demarcated by hatred and distrust of difference. Where communities are plural, this entails a fellow feeling that transcends religious and gender differences. Self-determination and participatory democracy are key, and consensus rather than majority voting are how decisions are taken. Nor are such utopias prescriptive—they embrace humility as a key principle that enables them to evolve organically and syncretically, weaving their ideas from experience, and their experience from ideas, always in relation to each other and the rest of Nature. Such utopias are not perfect—if utopia is a desire or a transformative impulse, then we can think of it as a direction rather than a destination. Utopias of the third kind are always becoming, always changing, edging only asymptotically toward whatever the ever-changing socially constructed definition of the ideal society might be. And while such a utopia in one part of the world is necessarily different from one in another (as different as Mendha Lekha and Chiapas, for example), they would, in my conception, share a planetary consciousness. My description is similar to Ursula K. Le Guin’s yin utopias and Krishan Kumar’s notion of the glocalized utopia, but is a little more specific.
Localized utopias (of the third kind) are perhaps the only real utopias possible, because geography, culture, history and the local manifestations of oppression shape, in part, how people conceive and build their ideals of the best life. So utopias, then, must be different from each other, yet their global expression must have weight, if we are to dislodge the global pyramid of power that has such a hold on our imaginations and our lives. How?
It is largely to find the answer to this question that I’ve been following for some years the Vikalp Sangam project and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which compile in detail the many different experiments in resistance and alternative living and being that are taking place around the world. In order to counter the paralysis of the imagination, we need three interrelated things: first, proof-of-concept experiments that are grounded in reality, which counter the paradigm of destructive “development” of modern industrial civilization. Second, stories, old and new, informed by these experiments but also freed by the imagination. We are
a storytelling species, after all. Narrativizing is what we do to co-construct and make sense of reality. Third, underlying all these is the need for different paradigms, onto-epistemologies, ways of seeing the world that free us from the trap of the imagination.
The real-life stories that I find most inspiring are characterized first of all by value systems and epistemologies that are noncapitalist: that is, important aspects of life, such as well-being: physical material and environmental, are not subject to commodification, nor is the market the model for life and living. Instead of an exclusive focus on the individual, or the pressure to conform to social norms under threat, we have individual freedom and social good through a sense of heightened responsibility to each other, expressed in such concepts as “ubuntu,” “buen vivir,” and “ecological swaraj” or “radical ecological democracy.” Individual agency and a deep social-ecological responsibility are not counter to each other, but reinforce each other in these societies. Thus such societies tend to have flattened hierarchies socially and politically. For example, in the village of Mendha Lekha, women have as much say in village decisions as men. And because every individual is important, the village works by consensus, not majority vote. Another key aspect of such utopias is the relationship between humans and the rest of Nature. Modern industrial civilization is founded on an exploitative relationship with other species, and an illusory separation of the human and natural. No value is given to the lives and survival of nonhuman beings. Contrast this with the Dongria Kondh people, who, when offered compensation packages to relocate so that their hills could be mined and their forests destroyed, asked “But what about the animals?” By considering themselves as part of the web of life, these communities have, over millennia of interacting with other species, developed sophisticated knowledge systems allowing them to interpret, affect, and be affected by the environment in ways that urban humans can barely begin to imagine. This also implies a concept of sufficiency, a respect for limits of natural reserves and processes, in striking contrast with the idea of endless economic growth that fuels the consumerism of modern industrial civilization. The related idea that most basic needs should be met locally is also a feature of these utopias. Thus food sovereignty, access to water and forest produce, and legal rights, especially collective rights to the land, are important to the long-term sustainability of these microcosms. All of this results in people who are actively engaged in their communities, always learning, leading lives of self-respect and dignity without exploiting others.
Time and Utopia
Beneath my exploration of different kinds of utopia is a certain implicit assumption that illuminates the need for alternate epistemologies: that of the nature of time. Linear time as an absolute concept is part of the Western Newtonian or mechanistic paradigm, and unfortunately it informs how we think about things well beyond the domain of validity of Newtonian physics. Time is a slippery concept, a fact that physicists recognize, but linear time is entrenched in modern industrial civilization in especially damaging ways. Consider the ubiquity of such actions as setting goals and determining straightline pathways toward them, even when situations are complex and demand a model of constant engagement and adaptive responses. Consider the compartmentalization of time in one’s daily schedule. Many cultures have alternative views of time in addition to linear time that recognize, for example, the prevalence of cycles. My own fascination with time has led me to speculate on its peculiar porous, fractal qualities by way of speculative fiction. However, a particularly clarifying and relevant view of time comes from Indigenous Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte’s essays, “Time as Kinship” and “Against Crisis Epistemologies.” In these he first talks about the way climate science tells the story of climatic changes on the planet—one that I am quite familiar with in my academic work as a physicist-transdisciplinary scholar of climate change—as a series of unfolding events and processes leading us to inevitable catastrophe. This is, of course, literally the case, especially in the absence of meaningful action. Whyte points out that this leads to fear as a natural reaction, which can be co-opted by the powers-that-be to push harmful technological “solutions” on us that hurt marginalized people and the environment. From my own readings about the brain and trauma, it seems also that when we experience deep fear, our prefrontal cortex, the seat of logical and complex thinking, tends to go offline.
But Whyte goes further. Through various tellings of the climate story from Indigenous perspectives, he brings out the contrast—Indigenous narratives of climate change are stories about changes in kinship relationships, where kin are all we are connected to, not just biological relations—thus trees, rocks, ants, birds. In this telling the climate crisis is a story of changing and ultimately broken relationships between kin. The implication is clear—what we need is to mend and heal these broken relationships. Of course some aspects of the healing will involve technology, but imagine the kinds of technology that might arise from such a perspective! Such an epistemology of coordination, to use Whyte’s term, cannot make the fatal error of simply substituting fossil fuel infrastructure with green energy, nor can it endorse the displacement of Indigenous people from their lands for a wind farm, or permit the mining of the ocean for minerals for electric vehicles. This way of seeing, when made real through collective responsibility and alternate models of governance, allows us to transcend the false dichotomies of capitalist modernity: individual/collective, human/nature, economy/ecology, to name a few.
Thus, as I see it from reading these essays, our work in the world is to recognize broken relationships at every scale and context, and to collectively and responsibly engage in the work of healing and mending, thereby allowing for our own healing. Such a process is also a response to urgency, but, I suspect, has a better chance at actually working than the fear-driven violence of solutions emerging from the linear time narrative. Thinking about this in relation to my conception of utopias of the Third Kind, it seems to me that this view of time—as the flow of kinship relationships—is already prevalent in some of the real-world utopias I have described, and the people in these places are already engaged in the work of reweaving the world from where they are. The metaphor of weaving is particularly natural for me, having grown up with the songs of the fifteenth-century Indian mystic poet and weaver Kabir, so it makes sense to me that we are weaving the world and simultaneously being woven by it, into being, into change! And this leads me to another realization, that proto-utopias of the Third Kind may sometimes exist here and now without our noticing—in temporal, embryonic ways, in small spacetime pockets even in colonial and capitalist spaces. These pocket proto-utopias, at once individual and collective, exist briefly in the places and moments when we sense—when we make and are made by—the relationships that make the world whole. They are fleeting, being temporally as well as spatially bound (my inner particle physicist is reminded of virtual particles of the submicrocosm that pop in and out of existence!). What can we do to incubate these spacetime pocket proto-utopias? To grow them into something that has weight in the world? As raindrops coalesce on a windowpane, perhaps we need to connect these fleeting glimpses of utopias with the ones already in the making around the world. Keep weaving, keep weaving.
Speculative Fiction and Utopias of the Third Kind
I am not sure to what extent speculative fiction has engaged in describing and exploring utopias of the third kind. There has certainly been plenty of exploration of a specific utopia grounded in a place, but what of a constellation of micro-utopias, each different from the other, yet connected via a planetwide network? According to Krishan Kumar, such fictive explorations don’t exist, but, being merely a writer, I will leave it to scholars to decide.
What I can say as a writer is that speculative fiction is ideal for examining utopias of the third kind. Humans are storytellers. The power of speculative fiction is to invoke narrative to immerse us in worlds where things aren’t the same as the world or worlds in which we live. There is surely no more revoluti
onary a question than “what if things were not as they are?” By imagining the multitude of answers to such “what-if” questions, speculative fiction has the potential to free us from the trap of the imagination I call the reality trap. The reality trap binds us to our current ways of life, and enables our continuing servitude to power hierarchies by asserting that only what is real now—“real” defined by the dominant modes of thinking—informs the possibilities of the future. Speculative fiction can take direct inspiration from real-life experiments that challenge and complicate the dominant notion of what’s real and possible. I imagine a positive (in all senses) feedback loop between such a literature and the material possibilities on the ground, each inspiring and being inspired by the other. May the world-destroying world-machine that has us in its thrall find within it the seeds, not just of its own destruction, but of multiple, viable, alternative worlds.